A husband, many of us will be discovering this Christmas, can remember football scores, all his old car number plates and most of Withnail & I – but “cannot remember what his wife asked him to bring back from the shops”.

Sales data released by Nielsen Book on Tuesday revealed that The Husband is number one in the Christmas charts, followed by last year’s chart topper, the ever-reliable Guinness World Records book.

Comedy writers Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley produced the series of Ladybird books for grownups spoofing modern problems, including “the wife”, “the hipster”, “the hangover”, “mindfulness” and “the mid-life crisis”.

They are an affectionate homage to the Ladybird books of the 1960s and 1970s, which taught children how a car might work, or a rocket, or a camera or – for the outdoorsy – farm machinery.

Morris and Hazeley, who have written for comedy shows including That Mitchell and Webb Look and Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, pitched the idea to executives at Ladybird owner Penguin, who were keen on the project in what is Ladybird’s centenary year and said yes.

Ladybird book pastiches become stocking-filler hit of 2015

Read more

Penguin originally printed 15,000 copies of each title but the books have proved a surprise runaway hit. In total more than 600,000 of the mini-hardbacks have sold in less than two months with the Bookseller magazine reporting that demand has been so high some shops have run out of stock. All the illustrations are from the original Ladybird archive, although the text is very different.

In an interview Morris said they had fond memories of the originals. “A lot of effort had gone into them. As a kid you felt a bit special being given one.” Making them funny had been an amazing opportunity. “It’s like being allowed to mess about with a national treasure,” he said. “It’s like repainting St Paul’s.”

The husband book is clearly proving a popular stocking filler and has sold 170,660 copies, making it the 31st bestselling book of the year. In the run-up to Christmas the charts had been dominated by Judith Kerr’s revival of her forgetful cat Mog, which technically died of old age in 2002 in Goodbye Mog. The cat was resurrected for Mog’s Christmas Calamity – a tie-in with the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert. The supermarket sold the books for £3, giving the money to Save the Children.

Mog stayed at number one between 15 November and 5 December.

The remaining titles in the top 10 are How it Works: The Wife (3); Harry Potter Colouring Book (4); Grandpa’s Great Escape by David Walliams (5); Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island (6); Old School: Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney (7); The Ladybird Book of the Hangover (8); Guy Martin: When You Dead, You Dead (9) and Jamie Oliver’s Everyday Super Food (10).

All of those books have some way to go to catch the year’s bestselling title: EL James’s fourth Fifty Shades book, Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as told by Christian. To week 51 of the year it had sold 1.08m copies.